They came to listen.
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Sitting at those round tables in the golden glow of the conference room, I needed to be heard.
Sitting at the long table on the platform in front of us, the panel – The Ministry of Health, the OMA Negotiators, the Physician Health Program, and a Dean of Medicine. Now, they say, they are ready to listen. They suggest that they are brave for doing so.
They invite us to come up to the microphone.
With pursed lips and flaring nostrils, my fists push me up from the table. Suppressed anger, needing its release.
And it's a race to the mic – first, second, third, fourth, lined up voices needing to be heard.
A Family Doctor from Prince Edward County, her voice cracking, fueled with her last bits of energy.
A Family Doctor from Sarnia. His colleague died; another has cancer. He carries 5000 patients. He is facing complaints about being unable to be seen on time.
An OB/GYN in a tertiary care hospital in Downtown Toronto. The stillbirths of women were unable to be induced. "Why didn't you pay the nurses? Why? Don’t you realize your actions have consequences?”
An ER doctor still resuscitates patients in the hallway despite promises for the past fifteen years that it will end. She has spent all that time carrying the ever-increasing load of patients, their expectations for care, and their anger.
She gives a name to it. This is Institutional Betrayal Trauma. [1]
This is fucking Institutional Betrayal Trauma. We are stuck in survival mode forging forth with the scars of repeated injuries.
We have been screaming out as we try to hold on to it through strained fingers, repeated promises, thoughts and prayers.
They didn't listen to our screams.
So now they listen to our feet.
[1] Dr. Jennifer Freyd coined this term about the long-term effects of Child Abuse and how it pushes people into survival mode. It has been adapted here to explain the abuse of moral injuries, where we are let down by a system that is supposed to support us. Freyd, J. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard Univ Press, 1998.
Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash